Tuesday, March 09, 2010
The thirteenth installment in the Final Fantasy series was released in North America this morning. Around 1am people came back with preordered copies and are already making pretty good progress through the game. It's a testament to how much college kids' priorities are misguided.
I have to say, it's nothing short of amazing what Square Enix managed to do with the graphics horsepower of the PS3. There's a certain quality to having each hair on the character's head individually represented, instead of having a static hair model, and then letting the physics engine take over. My friend tells me that the cutscenes (on the PS3 version, at least) are rendered in realtime and show no virtually no lag or stutter.
Yet at the same time, the game really doesn't look and play like the older Final Fantasy games. I'm not even talking about FF6 which I'm playing at the moment - I'm even talking about 13's predecessor, 12. There's something distinctly not Final Fantasy about the battle system, and I'm not entirely sure what it is. I'm also not sure if this is an artifact of the English dub or the game itself, but the music and effects aren't normalized with the character voices. I'm pretty sure that people cannot easily talk over gunfire, especially without yelling. I also quickly picked up on a very common criticism of the game, in that it's extremely linear and doesn't employ the idea of an overworld as much as the other games did.
Well, I'm still (slowly) making my way through the 16-year-old Final Fantasy 6. Maybe in the 2020s, when PS3s are as cheap as PS2s are now, I'll be playing thirteen?
Friday, March 05, 2010
I officially have proof that brain cells can and do regenerate, despite what others may be saying. For the first time, I spotted more people reading on the train than were plugged into cellphones or MP3 players. Good job, humanity!
So I've been missing for over a month now, due to circumstances that I'll label with the blanket term "technical difficulties". Hosting my own server might have been a good option when I lived within a few meters of the computer, but when it's 650km in a different state, asking family members to crawl under the couch and reboot the server in your stead shows itself to not be a viable option.
On the educational front, winter quarter is over, and things seem to have gone well enough. I've been home for the past week and it's been spent doing some much-needed relaxing. Spring quarter is bringing with it more computer science, more calculus, a discrete mathematics course, and a digital systems seminar. Though I'm not an MIT student, I've been reading up on MIT's OpenCourseWare Introductory Digital Systems Laboratory, which bills itself as "reputed to be one of the most demanding classes at MIT, exhausting many students' time and creativity". Going through the PowerPoint slides for the course has been an eye-opening experience, to say the least. We'll see how things go as the quarter progresses; hopefully I can make more timely updates from now on.
Just months after my first screen had to get replaced, I now have two issues with the new one. The first is a purely cosmetic crack on the plastic lid, which I fixed by covering the affected area over with duct tape (sound familiar?). The second is a pressure spot on the LCD the length of an entire finger. I have no clue where it came from, but it's been getting more noticeable lately: it resembles hard water damage, which is all the more bizarre. I have half a mind to stop bothering and dump some money on an old ThinkPad T60p, back when they still sold ones with the (to Antony: "beautiful") high-res IPS screens, and slapping in a Core 2 CPU to round it off. Of course, that's way out of budget for the moment, and paying almost $700 for a machine that's almost as old as mine doesn't seem like a great idea anyway.
I'm still trying to figure out what to do with all the computer hardware that college threw out. Among the things I'm selling are, to be honest, things that people don't want: a PowerMac G4 with no power supply, an acoustically-coupled modem (cool for five seconds), a P3 laptop with no battery or hard drive and some keys missing, and so forth. In my inability to sell a really old P2 laptop I found, I ended up turning it into an alarm clock that fits into a mere 256k of floppy disk space, OS included. Useless, I'm sure, but I'm going to try it for a few days or weeks and see how it goes.
The weather for the 650km trip back to college is looking pretty good. I'm going to try and aim to get in a bit earlier than the usual 9PM at night, so that I don't show up once everybody on the floor is already going nuts. Plus I want some time to get things done once I get settled in. We'll see. Have a good few days before I make a nebulous attempt at another blog post!
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
The recent launch of Google's Nexus One smartphone and the whole plethora of "Zune Phone" rumors have got me thinking - it seems like every day the tech industry is going further and further to try and become a singularity.
The way I see it, an established software-only vendor (i.e. Google/Microsoft) becoming a hardware vendor reeks of doom. Consider, for instance, the sizable Windows Mobile ecosystem - seems like every day I see somebody carting around a Windows Mobile-enabled phone. Despite the uniform OS, the device it's running on varies quite a bit - LG, HTC, and even Palm are making Windows Mobile handsets now. The big reason for that, as I see, is that there's a sort of guarantee of mutual competition: nobody's getting an unfair stake in the OS, since the distribution to individual handset makers is essentially the same.
The model breaks down when the software vendor decides that it's going to make its own souped-up version of the OS for its own handset. Now there are two versions of the OS: the Zune version of Windows Mobile and the generally-available version of Windows Mobile, or the Google version of Android and the open-source Android. Everybody else, in that case, would be at a loss.
It's bad enough that the handheld ecosystem is as closed as it is, and could really learn something from the home-and-business computer market, which is fairly well-defined in terms of standards. There's cross-platform C/C++, Java, GTK, Wx, and plenty of other ways to write fully-featured apps that can easily be ported to other platforms. There's PCI and USB for expansion, VGA and DVI for attaching a monitor, and so on. The handheld market hasn't caught on to this in the least - programming an app for any of webOS, iPhone OS, Windows Mobile, Android, BlackBerry OS, or Symbian is substantially different from programming for any other OS in the set. The closest you can get to cross-platformity is writing a Java app and having it run on whatever small fraction of phones come with Java loaded. Hardware's even more of a mess: the connectors for things like chargers, sync cables, and TV-out cables can even vary among handsets made by the same manufacturer.
Sadly, it looks like the closest we've come to handheld standards is the Google-led Open Handset Alliance, which is prone to the Nexus One problem that I described above. What's more, it calls for Android as an OS standard - Android development is basically a Google-branded Java derivative that runs on... well, Android, and only Android. It'd be nice if Maemo 5 takes off: it's based on already-proven standards seen in the desktop and workstation world: a Linux kernel running X11 and GTK+, not to mention a pretty standard C library. Throw in Bluetooth and a full USB host controller onto handsets, and we might have something workable.
Personally I'd buy a Nokia N900 if they weren't so damned expensive - in the meantime, my old Visor with no bells and whistles is still working great.
Friday, January 15, 2010
As a committed Mountain Dew addict, it's sort of implied that I'll try a new Mountain Dew variety when it comes out. Sometimes it'll be great and I temporarily switch to it (Pitch Black), so terrible I never buy it again (LiveWire), or just so-so I-could-care-less (Voltage). So now that Throwback is available en-masse in stores, I figured I'd give it a try.
Pepsi is using what I've heard is a circa-'50s label for Mountain Dew Throwback, which I thought was somewhat interesting:
Unlike the aforementioned Mountain Dew varieties, Throwback isn't a different Mountain Dew flavor; rather, it's regular Mountain Dew flavored with sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. The reason I drink Diet Mountain Dew is, in part, because I hate the consistency of regular Mountain Dew - it's too sticky and syrupy, whereas Diet has a consistency a bit more like that of straight carbonated water. With Throwback, this isn't really an issue: it's nowhere near as syrupy, and doesn't have a sticky aftertaste.
I do wonder, if high-fructose corn syrup is used over sugar as a cost-saving measure, why do regular Mountain Dew (with HFCS), Diet Mountain Dew (with aspartame, sucralose (Side-note: how old is sucralose anyway? I don't remember it ten years ago, and Firefox's spell checker doesn't recognize it either.), and acesulfame K), and Throwback (with real sugar) all cost the same amount of money?
Saturday, December 26, 2009
As of today I'm the proud owner of my own mail server. As I mentioned in my last blog post, it's comments like these that have prompted me to leave Google's services behind. My target is to have my Google account doing effectively nothing by June of this coming year - that means OpenID, Jabber, and others are similarly going to be migrated locally at some point in time.
This machine is actually running Debian. This was my first time ever setting up a Linux server, and might have taken some time to get the hang of, but was well worth it. One of the reasons I chose Linux for the project is that on Windows, I would have to use a pretty resource-hungry stack to do e-mail: IIS, SQL Server, Exchange Server, and Terminal Services. I'd be looking at a beast of a machine by my standards to run it - I'd guess maybe seven gigs of space and 512MB of memory, at minimum. Linux can fit an SSL'ed Web server, SSL'ed IMAP/POP3 and SMTP services, MySQL, PHP, and SSH into a package small and efficient enough to run with 192MB of memory, and takes up less than a gig of disk space while it's at it:
mail-server:~# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 191368 172216 19152 0 20496 51520
-/+ buffers/cache: 100200 91168
Swap: 374936 0 374936
mail-server:~# df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2 1741764 827672 914092 48% /
tmpfs 95684 0 95684 0% /lib/init/rw
udev 10240 568 9672 6% /dev
tmpfs 95684 0 95684 0% /dev/shm
And for those asking why I didn't just dump e-mail on top of my existing Web server, it's already choking on hosting my blog and Web site. Not everybody is like Antony with expensive dedicated server hardware. Even two old laptops can't compare with the power of a modern server.
As for what this means for you, if you communicate with me via e-mail, I will be sending out messages from the new e-mail address shortly, so that address books can be updated.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
I just got back in town and finally had a chance to fix my Web server. I had assumed the worst, but it looks like it'll be alright for now. Every time it boots, it tells me I have a different amount of RAM installed - and I tried different sets of modules, too. Things eventually have to die, and this laptop is going on 12 years, so I'd say it had a good life. In the event that something does happen to it, I have a replacement unit that, with some time and money, can substitute this one.
Some of you might remember my laptop pillage, when my school threw out stacks of perfectly good laptops and let students take as many as they wanted. With some cheap parts from eBay, these turned out to be great Christmas gifts: so far three have gone to friends and family, with the remaining two being old and broken (read: perfect for me to do something with).
While I'm home, I have some plans to build a second, and if I have time, third servers. My disdain for Google grows every time I hear something like these comments from Google's CEO. Coupled with how Google is absorbing independent companies left and right and turning itself into a behemoth conglomerate on a Microsoft scale, I think it's time to distance myself from Google. That said, I'm looking into rolling my own mail from now on, so server number two will be a mail server. If I have time, server number three will be a streaming media server, since I can't get local radio out at college. (To Antony: I am poor, I don't have one big, powerful, dedicated server. I have to use several underpowered trash laptops and run them off my home Internet connection instead.)
In other news, I'm starting to think the concept of Twitter is actually decent, but I still have some problems with its inherent centralization and "social" nature. As most of you probably know, I am not the world's biggest fan of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook - even though in my generation it's almost the same as living without a phone, I don't subscribe to either one. Regardless, I am thinking of creating a system in which I can e-mail the mail server via my phone or similar, and have that server push mail to to the Web server where it would be syndicated here in my blog. But that's a ways away, I have a feeling I won't be getting to it this week.
As far as software goes, I did write an alarm clock a few days ago after forgetting to take my clock home. Over break I have to work on a Battleship game and a word search solver for CS class. I haven't yet found out if college lets me release my code or if they own it, but if it does let me, I'll be sure to do so.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
It's been a long month! The end of the academic quarter brings with it final exams, final papers, projects, and of course the usual insanity brewing on my floor.
Throughout the month, my friends and I have made a habit of scouting for trash PCs on campus. We seem to throw out perfectly good hardware with no good reason, which is great for us, since we can capitalize on those sorts of leavings. Among my friends' pillages have been some recent-looking Inspiron laptops, rack-mountable switches, vintage IBM Model M keyboards, and dedicated hardware firewalls, among other things. As for me, I walked away with a fully working Compaq Deskpro, a Sun Blade 1500 workstation, and a grand total of five laptops: a Latitude CPi, C600, two C640s, and a C840. The C840 and one of the C640s have been given to friends and family; the other C640 will soon be going to another friend, while the Deskpro and the Sun tower are both on Craigslist. Seeing as Sun workstations are expensive, I'm hoping I can make some decent money off it.
As for the two remaining laptops, I have some plans to migrate my e-mail away from Gmail and onto a home-based system, much like my Web server (powering this blog) is right now. Google's been getting a bit too Big Brother-ish for me lately, so if I can possibly run something like that myself, it's at this point in my best interest to do so.
Unlike Antony who's installed the latest few Mac OS Xes the day they came out, I just got around to installing the final version of Windows 7. Since I left my NAS in my dorm when leaving for break, I ended up moving about 200mb of un-backed-up files to a CompactFlash card just in case, then doing a clean install. The Seven installer still creates a Windows.old folder, so bringing back all my other files was a cut-and-paste job. Overall, the RC was pretty stable for a pre-release version of Windows - I remember back with Vista, the Desktop Window Manager in the prerelease versions would crash and bring productivity to a standstill for about thirty seconds. Seven RC did none of that, and so far I haven't seen any big differences between the RC and final versions. Final seems to be using a bit more system resources than RC did, though that might be because of performance tweaks I did during the few months I had Seven RC installed.
Over the break I made some progress on two projects I've been working on. First of all, I dug out the site layout that I started over the summer and hadn't touched since. Aside from adding some new content, I plan on making my source code to two classes available: Intro to Computer Programming, my high-school Java class, and Computer Science I, the Java class I took this past quarter. Even if they don't end up doing the world any particular good, my hope is that I might help somebody pick up Java. I of course won't mention what school's class either one goes to, in the event that somebody tries to pass either class with copy-and-paste.
My second project is a car PC that's gone through several revisions over the past few months. Up until earlier this week, the most recent revision was a mess: it consisted of a separate laptop mounted in back, powered directly off 12 volts from the overhead lamp (the laptop was actually rated for 19 volts), with a desktop mic shoved underneath the front visor and the cord haphazardly taped to the left interior side of the car. It ran XP along with the outdated and clumsy Plus! Voice Command software. That's not to mention that the computer didn't enjoy being shaken, as is typical of a car ride, or the voltage fluctuations that come as a result of turning the car on and off.
That is no longer. On the hardware side, I'm now using my laptop along with a proper car adapter. Microphone input is now handled much more cleanly: I managed to take out the ceiling console and mount a microphone in the slot where the carphone mic would have gone. The mic cable is then snaked through to the right visor, where it drops along the side and close by to the passenger seat. On the software side, I'm now running Windows Speech Recognition (built into Vista and Seven) along with an excellent Media Player speech macro I found, tweaked to make it a bit more car-friendly (all commands need to be prefixed with "DJ", to avoid idle noise being interpreted as commands). In the future, I'd like to find a laptop powerful enough to run Vista as a standalone WSR unit, then mount that in the trunk and ferry video up to a small screen via VGA, but that's still a ways off.
Two of my friends got a huge 36" LCD HDTV while I was gone, so to mark the occasion, they had a Star Wars marathon - all six movies in one day, with a room full of 15-ish people. Everybody liked it enough that we did a Lord of the Rings marathon later in the week. When I come back over Christmas break, we'll be having a Matrix Trilogy marathon. I guess I have to admit that huge TVs are fun sometimes.
I'll be going back to college tomorrow until Christmas time. Hopefully everything I left there is still in one piece!
Saturday, October 31, 2009
On Mondays and Wednesdays, I've been having an interesting problem: two almost-adjacent two-hour classes that require me to run back to my dorm after the first class is over, so that I can recharge my laptop. Annoying? You bet.
I researched an extra battery but found out that one would run me $180, and I wouldn't be able to use my docking station with it. So I came up with this:
"This" being a 180-watt-hour battery pack constructed from two UPS batteries and a car adapter. Now I can run around for eleven hours without having to plug in - although my ability to run around is somewhat hindered by the fact that they weigh in at 5.2kg. Either way, better than spending $180.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Today I brought my watch to have the battery replaced - I figured that was a simple enough process. After trying Wal-Mart and Target, both of which told me they didn't service digital watches (strange, seeing as Wal-Mart is usually where I bring the watch to replace the battery), I brought it to a small local jeweler and ended up having to pay them eleven dollars just to replace it.
But it doesn't end there. When the jeweler's gave me the watch back, I found out that none of the buttons on the side were functional. Furthermore, part of the seal on the back was hanging out, as if it had been stretched out of proportion. When I mentioned this, they simply told me that their policy didn't say that the watch needed to work, but they gave me a new battery, so I had to pay for it anyway.
Seems like people will do anything for money nowadays, even high-profile places like jewelers' shops. In any case, I bought another (identical) watch off Amazon just now, which should ship within the week.
Thursday, October 01, 2009
Those guys actually went around to pick people up, too.